Four locations stood out. Their fourteen-hour post oak cooks consistently gave her a recovery rate near eighty-one percent on the usable material she processed, with strong flavor and few avoidable losses. The other ten averaged closer to sixty-eight percent under their ordinary mix of batches. The difference had seemed merely interesting while she was collecting free raw material, but now it changed the cost of every pound she produced.
She took out a calculator and worked the problem several ways. About five thousand pounds from the best four locations could produce roughly the quantity she had expected from six thousand pounds at the lower-yielding sites. That meant she could buy less raw material without sacrificing the finished inventory goal she had set for the spring. The saving was not enough to make the problem disappear, but it gave her a route through it.
At seven that morning she called Rick back and proposed a narrower arrangement. She would purchase the fat from the four best-performing pits at the new market price and release Ironwood from sending her the other ten locations' waste. The company could sell that material to the hauler without losing money, while she paid fairly for the lots most valuable to her. Rick said he could live with that, although he asked why she cared so much about those particular pits.
"They behave better in my kettle," she told him. It was accurate, and he accepted it without another question. She did not tell him that the selected lots also gave her the strongest documented source profile for the product Ironwood hoped to put on a grocery shelf. He would have regarded that as a matter for the company's product-development team, not for a woman who had once taken the barrels for free.
The narrower route caused a new problem. Wallace's collection schedule had been efficient because the truck visited a cluster of kitchens and returned with a full load. Four selected locations were farther apart, and the best collection times did not fit neatly together. One kitchen wanted the material picked up before dawn; another needed the driver to come after its evening trimming was complete. Marlene could either let the fat sit longer than her rules allowed or pay for a more complicated route.
She chose the route. A second driver, more miles, insulated containers positioned at separate pickup points, and additional diesel would cost roughly $1,900 over the remaining collection period. It was a painful amount because she could imagine almost exactly which bills that money might otherwise pay. She had to replace a worn cooler gasket, Eli's hours were increasing, and the property tax notice lay unopened beneath a stack of receipts.
Eli watched her add the route costs to the spreadsheet June had helped her set up. "You still making money on it?" he asked. Marlene said she would be if the finished product sold at a strong enough price and if the yields held. "That's two ifs," he replied. She gave him a tired smile and said two was better than the dozen she had carried when they first opened the kettle.